How did these terrorist acts escape the notice of the media? Why wasn't the threat alert level elevated? It's because all of the above scenarios never happened. These were exercises conducted by U.S. Customs and Border Protection managers and key staff members, as well as their federal, state, and local counterparts. During the exercises they discussed how to handle such nightmarish events if they were real. The process, which is commonly used by the military in their tactical planning, is called a tabletop exercise.

CBP turned to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to train CBP officers how to design, develop, and deliver tabletop exercises. FEMA has a long history of preparing people to respond to emergencies and natural disasters like fires, floods, and storms. An existing master exercise practitioner (MEP) program was modified to meet CBP's anti-terrorism needs. The result was a three-week training program divided into two segments. The first part (two weeks long) was held at FEMA's National Emergency Training Center at Mt. Weather, Va., in late 2003. The final week was conducted at FEMA's Emergency Management Institute (EMI) in Emmitsburg, Md., in early 2004.

During the interval between the two training sessions, the participants were divided into three or four-person teams comprised of both CBP officers and Border Patrol agents. As a training requirement, those teams returned to their duty stations to develop and deliver tabletop exercises for each Field Operations office and CBP Border Patrol sector. A total of 27 different exercises, each based on a terrorist incident, were held across the country and Puerto Rico in less than 90 days. Almost all the events involved players from other federal, state, and local agencies as well as our counterparts from Canada and Mexico, adding a new dimension to the CBP tabletop program.

What did these teams learn from this training?

Initially, they became familiar with the fundamentals of exercise design, development, delivery, and evaluation. Classroom instruction was followed by practical exercises where the participants organized their own tabletops, playing the roles of federal, state, and local response officials. Students learned how to conduct a basic tabletop exercise, but they also learned how to do a functional exercise where FEMA instructors acted as "control simulators" to direct an emergency situation. These "instructor-simulators" inserted sudden scenario developments (called "injects") to test player responses to unexpected turns of events. The only thing the participants did not experience was a full-scale exercise when actual emergency response assets, like fire and police units, react on site to a staged incident.

Armed with this training, the teams returned to their ports and devised terrorist incidents for their tabletop exercise, tailored to their duty locations. The teams recorded the policy issues or procedural issues that needed to be addressed, either locally or at the national level.

The MEP course is perhaps the only CBP training initiative that places both CBP officers and CBP Border Patrol agents into the same training arena and then requires them to work as a team together back at their duty stations. Several participants have since acknowledged that this has helped them to build a stronger working relationship.

CBP now has institutionalized the tabletop exercise program by creating a nationwide network of certified master exercise practitioners. FEMA officials praised the CBP participants as being among the best students they have ever trained. Acting Assistant Commissioner of the Office of Training and Development, Chief Tom Walters, told the teams during the closing ceremony at EMI, "Although this is the end of the training, it is just the beginning of the tabletop program for CBP." Indeed, the tabletops will multiply, reaching to the port and sector level. The exercises will remain a core element of CBP's national anti-terrorism strategy, helping to make the agency better prepared to prevent or respond to a terrorist attack or an attempt to infiltrate our borders.